Curiosities of Heat

by Lyman Beecher Tefft

“This opinion seems probable from the fact that this is the purpose for which God has actually used and is now using the world. Here he keeps and governs the human race. This race is made up neither of holy beings nor of hopeless reprobates. They are the creatures of God; fallen indeed, yet loved; sinful, but objects of divine compassion; deserving of righteous wrath, but the recipients of the offers of salvation through Christ. Even penitent believers in Christ and devoted servants of God are not free from evil propensities, but need to be kept under constant training and discipline. This is the use to which the Creator has actually put the world. Is it not reasonable to believe that he designed it for their use? Ought we to believe that God planned the world for an object for which it never has been and never will be employed?

“If sin were removed from the world, the chief part of human suffering would be removed. This no man can deny. Wars would cease; the want, disease, and woe resulting from selfishness, idleness, and vice would disappear, and nothing would stand between man and his Maker. What new life and joy would fill the world if free communication were restored between man and God, and the divine smile were again to enlighten the world! It would seem that heaven had enlarged her borders to embrace this earthly ball. But the fact would still remain that this physical world is unfitted to be the dwelling-place of sinless beings. The constitution of the world would bring upon them pains and evils which would seem a most unworthy heritage for loving and obedient children of our heavenly Father. Let sin be taken away, and wearisome toil in subduing the earth would remain. The soil of the earth is hard and clogged with stones, and clammy with stagnant waters, and sown well with the seeds of noxious weeds, and overgrown with thorns and thistles. Endless watchfulness and toil is the price of a livelihood. With the sweat of his face man must eat his bread. An army of enemies have pre-empted the soil which man must till. This state of things the word of God refers to sin: ‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ The necessity of toiling as we do now for our daily bread, God denounced upon man as a curse on account of sin. We cannot, therefore, regard this as a suitable condition for sinless beings.

“This burden of toil is lightened by the progress of modern sciences and inventions much less than some men think. Every step of progress has been made by the sacrifice of hecatombs of human lives. From our laboratories and workshops products of human skill, rich and rare, are sent forth; but what are they but smelted and hammered and graven and woven human bones and sinews, the health and life of men? No means have been discovered by which the most necessary processes of the arts can be made otherwise than dangerous to health. Only when thousands of miserable workmen had perished was Sir Humphrey Davy’s safety-lamp invented; and now the danger, to say nothing of the hard toil, of the collier’s life is only lessened, but not removed. Still, our furnaces roar and the whole tide of civilization goes on by the health-destroying servitude of men, buried alive as it were in the dark bosom of the earth. Would that seem to be a fitting employment for the sinless children of the all-loving Father? Employés in many kinds of manufacture slowly sink under the accumulated evils of daily toil, and no means of making their employments healthful have been discovered. The friction-match, which has become so nearly a necessity, is made by a process so destructive to health that only a certain class of laborers can be prevailed upon to do the work. I might go on to speak of other painful circumstances in which men find themselves by the almost antagonistic attitude of Nature. But if we reject these dangerous processes of manufacture and art, we go back at once to the wooden plough, the distaff and tinder-box of primitive times, and also to primitive poverty and primitive toil, and, I may also add, to primitive exposure to the hostile and pitiless forces and inclemencies of Nature. Purge the earth of sin, and wearisome toil would still remain. Nature must be nursed and cultivated or she yields no bread. Her hostile attitude must be overcome; the thorns and thistles must be rooted out; and every step of progress, won by suffering, must be held by painful work and watchfulness; otherwise Nature returns to the wild and savage state. Relax the culture of the choicest fruit, and it begins to deteriorate; leave the best-blooded breed of cattle to itself, and it returns again to the level of native, uncultured stock.

“The inhabitants of this world are also liable at all times to diseases and destructive accidents. This condition of things could not be changed without changing the entire structure and plan of the world. Is that a fit dwelling-place for a sinless being where chilling winds one day shrivel his skin and fill his bones with rheumatic pains, and the next, sweltering heats pervade all his system with languid lassitude—where miasma lies in wait unseen to poison his blood, kindle the malignant fever, and bring him to the shades of death, and every form of accident crouches in ambush, ready to spring upon his victim unawares and tear him limb from limb? We cannot see that the absence of sin would dissipate this liability to disease and the danger of accidents. Nay, this liability and danger are written upon the very constitution of the human body. The finger of God has engraved it upon every muscle and bone and life-cell. The Creator gave the body that wonderful power called the vis medicatrix—the power of recovering from injuries and repairing damage done to itself. Pull a leg from a grasshopper and another grows in its place. By this we know that the Creator understood the liability of this little insect to lose a limb, and prepared him for it. In like manner the power in man’s body to heal a wound or join a broken bone gives us to understand that the Creator expected man to live in the midst of danger. The precaution proves the risk.

“These accidents are such as no possible carefulness could guard against. To say nothing of the fact that all our knowledge of these perils comes from a painful experience of danger and death, what care, even after ages of sad experience, could ward off the thunderbolt? What carefulness could guard against the tornado on the land, or the hurricane and the cyclone upon the sea? Who should stand sentinel against the unseen poison borne upon the wings of the wind? What power should save him from the bursting of the volcano and the jaws of the earthquake? What care could give him knowledge of the qualities of all natural substances, that he might avoid their dangerous properties? We can suppose a divine care over man that should do all this and save men from harm, but it would be a providence superseding all human knowledge and exertion—it must be a providence to which the human race is now a stranger; miracles would then be the rule, and the undisturbed course of Nature the exception.

“If, however, we suppose that God designed the world as a training-school, so to speak, of fallen beings, such as the word of God declares the human race to be, all is plain, everything is suitable and harmonious. We can see the fitness of at least the chief outlines of man’s earthly condition, and can perceive God’s wisdom and goodness in the constitution of the world.

“The pain and woe-producing agencies of Nature are seen to be not at all contradictory to goodness, but on the other hand eminently wise and righteous. The whole sum of human misery expresses God’s displeasure at sin. By their sufferings men learn how abhorrent is sin in God’s sight. By the consequences of evil-doing they learn not to transgress. As none are free from the taint of depravity, none are free from pains. The necessity of labor—one of the elements of the primal curse—is a check to sin on the part of the vicious, and a discipline and trial to virtue on the part of the penitent. The multiform trials of life—which can indeed be borne well only by the grace of God—while they teach the evil of sin and keep the heart chastened and subdued, nourish heroic and dauntless virtue in the faithful. ‘Daily cares’ become ‘a heavenly discipline.’ Dangers and calamities startle the stupid conscience, and keep alive the sense of responsibility to God on the part of the wicked; they quicken the sense of weakness and dependence in the believing and educate their faith in God. The more sudden and overwhelming these evils, and the more these dangers are placed beyond the possibility of being warded off by human care, the more do they awaken in men a sense of the divine presence and of responsibility to God.

“But would not all these natural agencies subserve essentially the same ends in the discipline of unfallen and sinless beings? By no means. If sufferings came upon a sinless being, he could not feel that they came as chastisements; he could not feel them to be deserved. They would be to him a ‘curse causeless,’ and hence would bring no advantage. He could only cry out in astonishment, ‘Father, why am I, thine obedient son, thus smitten?’ Calamity falling upon the innocent would be an anomaly in the universe. But now the sufferer, pierced through and through with a sense of ill desert, meekly bows his head, murmuring, ‘Father, all thy judgments are just and right.’

“One very important feature of the world we live in is its moral symbolism. The world is full of most suggestive symbols and emblems of moral good and evil. There are all beautiful and glorious things, to stand as types of goodness, truth, and righteousness; there are all loathsome, malignant, and hideous things, to serve as the types of folly and wickedness. Was it merely an accident that the dove was fitted to become the emblem of purity and of the Holy Spirit? the lamb, to be the emblem of gentleness, of Christ the gentle Sufferer, and of his suffering people? the ant, to be the type of prudent industry? the horse, of spirit and daring? and the lion, of strength and regal state? Was it only an accident that prepared cruel beasts and disgusting, poisonous reptiles as the types of evil passions and sins—that made the venom of the viper, the cunning of the fox, the blood-thirstiness of the wolf, the folly of the ape, and the filth of the swine, symbols of foul, subtle, malignant sin and folly? Nature is full of these emblems. The palm tree with its crown of glory, the cedar of Lebanon, the fading flower and withering grass, the early dew and the morning mist, the thorn hidden among the leaves of the fragrant rose, poisons sweet to the taste, and medicines bitter as gall,—how all these natural things preach to men sermons concerning spiritual verities! There is no virtue or grace which is not commended to man by its image of beauty in the animal tribes; there is no vice against which men are not warned by its loathsome, disgusting form shadowed out in the instinctive baseness of irresponsible brutes.

“Thus we find earth, air, and sky to be full of silent voices proclaiming in the ears of man that which he most of all needs to remember. These types and symbols of virtue and vice are specially needed by fallen beings. They seem fitted for beings whose spiritual eyes are blinded and all their spiritual senses blunted—beings with whom there is no longer ‘open vision’ of spiritual realities. These pictures of evil are most impressive to men who see in them the reflection of their own base passions. How the fetid goat and the swine wallowing in the mire speak to the lecherous man and the drunkard! In a world of sinless beings these mimic vices would seem rather to mar God’s handiwork.